Obama: A monument in California, nothing here

President Obama will, early next week, designate a Cesar E. Chavez National Monument on property in California where the late Hispanic civil rights leader lived and launched the United Farmworkers Union, and where he is buried.

Obama, courting the Latino vote, will travel to Keene, California, next Monday to a site called Nuestra Senora Reina de la Pax (Our Lady Queen of Peace) to exercise his authority under the Antiquities Act, which gives the President authority to set aside national monuments.

President Barack Obama exits Air Force One during Seattle fundraising foray.

The President has established two monuments during closing weeks of the 2012 campaign. The first was a 4,700-acre Chimney Rock National Monument in Colorado, a “Battleground” state where the environment is a significant issue.

But the Obama administration taken no action, and said nothing, about a proposed San Juan Islands National Monument, designed to protect 955 acres of sensitive federally owned land in the island chain that bumps up against the Canadian border.

Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., San Juan County Commissioners and 150 local businesses have endorsed the proposal. A remark by Cantwell — that she would put a tattoo on her forehead to get Obama to act — has inspired a campaign of stick-on tattoos by Environment Washington.

Michelle Obama is coming to Seattle on Tuesday for a fundraiser at the Westin Hotel (prices $500 and $1,000 for tickets, $5,000 for a photo with the First Lady): Washington is again being used as an ATM machine for the President’s reelection campaign. The First Lady is holding no public events.

The Chavez monument was made possible by land donations from the National Chavez Center, the Cesar Chavez Foundation, the United Farmworkers and the Chavez family. It will include a visitor center, Cesar Chavez’s office, the Farmworkers legal aid office and the home of Cesar and Helen Chavez.

The monument site was the “center of some of the most significant civil rights moments in our nation’s history,” Obama said in a statement, and the Chavez “legacy will be preserved and shared to inspire generations to come.”

It will be the fourth National Monument designed by Obama, all of them small in size.

The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in 1996 designated a 1.7 million acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in the canyonlands of Southern Utah. In 2000, he created the Hanford Reach National Monument, protecting Hanford’s white bluffs and the only stretch of free-flowing Columbia River between Bonneville Dam and the Canadian Border.

Other Clinton-era monuments include Upper Missouri Breaks in Montana, the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, and the two-section Giant Sequoia National Monument in California.